Fragrance as a Journal of Memory

I’ve never kept a real journal, I always love the idea and I'll buy notebooks that will only ever get a couple pages of words. I've never been good at keeping a diary, not one that holds words, anyway.

Mine lives in scent.

Every chapter of my life is marked by the scent of nostalgia, a quiet reminder of who I was and where I’ve been.
Sometimes I catch them in passing. It's often a trace of salt in the air, a hint of patchouli from a stranger, and I’m right back inside a moment I didn’t realize I’d been carrying.

The first page smells like the ocean back home. 
Middle Cove, in late summer. The air a mix of salt, seaweed, and cold wind that smells alive and even in August, always sinks right into your bones with a soft chill. That’s where I learned what it felt like to belong to a place. Even now, 23 years past moving away, any time I smell the brine of saltwater, something in me settles.

Then there’s the scent of old real wood floors. The kind that creak under your weight, that split and have grooves so deep you can bury your secrets inside. The kind that shift and groan with the season. My aunt used to live in the house a full rowed street in St. John's. It had to have been a hundred years old and it smelled like history and warmth, like something that existed before I did. That memory sits at the edge of when I left home, when everything started shifting.

Another chapter smells like chlorine. I know — it's one of those I shouldn't love this but I do scents. A guilty pleasure really. After years of early morning swim practices, the echo of water in tiled rooms, skin that always smelled faintly overly clean no matter how hard you scrubbed. It’s strange how even exhaustion can smell familiar, comforting, earned.

Then there’s patchouli: the scent that belongs to my best friend’s car, which the car was aptly named after, the summer we lived together in cottage country Ontario. Every window rolled down, music playing, incense still burning from last night. That scent will always mean freedom, youth, and being known without having to explain yourself. It's a scent I hold close to me, filled with golden sunshine, our rolling fits of laughter, and the one I turn to the most to keep her close although we live on either coasts now.

The next note is a bright and sun-kissed clementine orange from my mom’s perfume.
She wears it in the way some people wear light. I still find myself reaching for it when I want to be the best version of myself. The most grounded. The most resilient. It smells like strength, like safety, like home.

And now, when I want to feel like stepping into the deepest of hugs, the scent of vanilla and tobacco fill my house. It’s the fragrance of a life I built slowly. There’s something grounding about it, a little sweet, a little smoky, like exhaling after holding your breath. It’s the smell of warmth against cold air, of a space that finally feels like my own.

I think fragrance is how we record the parts of life that words can’t hold. It’s the invisible thread that ties who we are now to who we’ve been before.

When I came on to help build Osero's brand, I always come back to I kept thinking about how scent carries emotion, how it bypasses logic and speaks directly to the body. I didn’t want to just tell the story of fragrance and tell an audience what memories it should invoke for them; I wanted to make space to find what scents hold memories for you. To help bring you to the feeling of being here, fully, in this moment so that you can return to it in a moment of nostalgia. 

The older I get, the more I realize how much I trust my senses to tell my story. The smells I return to are the same ones that shape how I see the world: grounding, nostalgic, alive.

If I ever do write a journal, I think I’d still want it to smell like something.
Salt air, old wood, patchouli, clementine, vanilla, and tobacco. 
Every note a reminder of a life that’s been lived. Not in words, but in breath.